1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:14,600 This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,939 for Thursday the 7th of September 2023. 2 00:00:14,600 --> 00:00:19,000 Today's show is entitled, How I Got Into Tech and Hacking. 3 00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:22,200 It is part of the series How I Got Into Tech. 4 00:00:22,200 --> 00:00:26,800 It is hosted by Trickster and is about 21 minutes long. 5 00:00:26,800 --> 00:00:29,400 It carries a clean flag. 6 00:00:29,400 --> 00:00:36,200 The summary is getting interested in tech can start in both the odd and familiar places. 7 00:00:36,200 --> 00:00:40,920 This is Trickster's story. 8 00:00:40,920 --> 00:00:42,800 Hey everyone, this is Trickster. 9 00:00:42,800 --> 00:00:48,240 If the name rings a bell, you might know me as the co-founder of mobilegames.com. 10 00:00:48,240 --> 00:00:52,880 I am also a demo scene coder for many, many years. 11 00:00:52,880 --> 00:00:55,920 I have a few first place productions under my belt. 12 00:00:55,920 --> 00:01:00,240 In these days, I am the showrunner of a yearly vintage computing festival. 13 00:01:00,240 --> 00:01:06,040 As a hack divist, I was also involved in the birth of the abandoned wear movement in 1997. 14 00:01:06,040 --> 00:01:10,360 I am also one of the curators of a Dawes game archival effort that has been going on 15 00:01:10,360 --> 00:01:14,880 for a slightly over 25 years. 16 00:01:14,880 --> 00:01:20,360 While I don't use the term to describe myself, I do consider myself a hacker. 17 00:01:20,360 --> 00:01:25,600 I thought since Hacker Public Radio is running a little low on shows, it might be time 18 00:01:25,600 --> 00:01:30,080 to record an emergency episode following the most common topic that people pick, how 19 00:01:30,080 --> 00:01:32,920 I got into tech. 20 00:01:32,920 --> 00:01:39,040 I got into tech via intellectual curiosity and also the need to control my environment a 21 00:01:39,040 --> 00:01:40,280 little bit. 22 00:01:40,280 --> 00:01:48,240 I was an unabashed nerd as a kid and unfortunately throughout middle school, I was bullied 23 00:01:48,320 --> 00:01:51,680 and in many cases beaten weekly. 24 00:01:51,680 --> 00:01:57,240 So these two impulses, needing to control my environment because of that, and just simply 25 00:01:57,240 --> 00:01:59,760 being curious, naturally led to hacking. 26 00:01:59,760 --> 00:02:05,240 So I am going to go ahead and describe my timeline in those terms because how I got into 27 00:02:05,240 --> 00:02:10,240 tech and how I got into hacking to me are synonymous. 28 00:02:10,240 --> 00:02:14,200 So let's go all the way back to 1977. 29 00:02:14,200 --> 00:02:20,880 Total trickster is six years old and his father is working for Teletype Corporation, which 30 00:02:20,880 --> 00:02:24,800 used to make machines that would sit on either end of a phone line and someone would 31 00:02:24,800 --> 00:02:28,960 type on one end and it would output be type written on the other end. 32 00:02:28,960 --> 00:02:33,960 Obviously these machines are gone, having been supplemented by everything from facts to 33 00:02:33,960 --> 00:02:34,960 the internet. 34 00:02:34,960 --> 00:02:41,600 But at the time in 1977, it was necessary to analyze serial lines and so my father brought 35 00:02:41,640 --> 00:02:47,000 home a serial line analyzer and it's my very first memory of sitting in front of anything 36 00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:49,440 with a display and a keyboard. 37 00:02:49,440 --> 00:02:53,440 You would connect serial to both ends and set the board rate and what have you and then 38 00:02:53,440 --> 00:02:57,560 you would be able to inspect the traffic going back and forth, but you could also inject 39 00:02:57,560 --> 00:02:58,560 traffic. 40 00:02:58,560 --> 00:03:02,680 So you would type on the keyboard and it would show up on this tiny one line of vacuum 41 00:03:02,680 --> 00:03:08,000 fluorescent display and I suppose that's where it all began really. 42 00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:13,440 So forward two more years to 1977 and now I am in second grade and looking at an Apple 43 00:03:13,440 --> 00:03:21,200 2, but at the time I'm too interested in arcade games and console gaming with Atari 2600 44 00:03:21,200 --> 00:03:26,480 to notice really that the Apple 2 was not just an educational instrument, it was actually 45 00:03:26,480 --> 00:03:28,360 a computer running software. 46 00:03:28,360 --> 00:03:35,040 But that changed a year later in 1980 when a neighbor's mother who used to work for 47 00:03:35,040 --> 00:03:41,800 AT&T, brought home an Osborn which is a portable or really legible computer that runs 48 00:03:41,800 --> 00:03:47,480 CPM and has two five and a quarter inch floppy drives and one of the discets that she 49 00:03:47,480 --> 00:03:53,120 brought home and I'm not even sure she knew she brought it home was colossal cave adventure. 50 00:03:53,120 --> 00:03:58,040 My friend and I would, I don't know how but we figured out how to start it up and we 51 00:03:58,040 --> 00:04:03,120 spent hours trying to solve colossal cave adventure just exploring everything and typing 52 00:04:03,200 --> 00:04:09,840 all the verbs we could think of, naughty and nice and that was pretty much it that's so 53 00:04:09,840 --> 00:04:17,200 the seed for hey this is an instrument this is a machine that does what I tell it and I've 54 00:04:17,200 --> 00:04:20,080 never really shaken that off. 55 00:04:20,080 --> 00:04:23,320 Let's go forward three more years and end up in 1983. 56 00:04:23,320 --> 00:04:28,880 I'm at a friend's house they have an IBM PCXT and that friend actually the friend of 57 00:04:29,600 --> 00:04:38,560 their father worked for AT&T and as such had free long distance back in the 80s and some of 58 00:04:38,560 --> 00:04:44,320 the 90s long distance cost extra money for those too young to remember you would pay something 59 00:04:44,320 --> 00:04:50,160 like 10 or 15 cents a minute if you called overseas it was dollars per minute thankfully we 60 00:04:50,160 --> 00:04:56,000 don't have that problem anymore but when you had free phone calls and a computer and a 61 00:04:56,080 --> 00:05:02,240 modem you could imagine that hilarity would ensue we would connect a computer but we wouldn't 62 00:05:02,240 --> 00:05:08,640 do it to download files because we weren't quite aware of that yet we would join these online 63 00:05:08,640 --> 00:05:13,600 games where lots of real people could all participate in the same game think like a trivia 64 00:05:13,600 --> 00:05:18,720 game or something like that and we joined them not because we wanted to play the games but because 65 00:05:18,720 --> 00:05:24,400 we wanted to just simply hang out in the game lobbies and talk to people and it was astonishing 66 00:05:24,400 --> 00:05:29,680 that there were people from all across the continental united states all typing to each other 67 00:05:29,680 --> 00:05:37,120 was fascinating also in 1983 I was fortunate enough to go to a middle school that had really good 68 00:05:37,120 --> 00:05:45,680 funding they had a lab of apple two pluses and I discovered apple writer and apple writer let me 69 00:05:45,680 --> 00:05:51,600 type up my messy papers instead of handwriting them and you know constantly racing and so on 70 00:05:52,080 --> 00:05:57,520 I would get half a letter grade more improvement than my classmate simply because I would hand 71 00:05:57,520 --> 00:06:02,080 in typewritten things not typewritten of course they would be printed on the dot matrix printer but 72 00:06:02,080 --> 00:06:07,600 you get the idea and of course I love the idea that the computer could help me fix my mistakes 73 00:06:07,600 --> 00:06:15,120 before I exposed them to others I really wanted to computer at that point but unfortunately we 74 00:06:15,280 --> 00:06:21,600 could not afford one but my father was very forward thinking and instead of purchasing a computer 75 00:06:21,600 --> 00:06:31,280 he bought a computer magazine subscription it hours was family computing so every month a computer 76 00:06:31,280 --> 00:06:37,200 magazine would arrive and I would just consume it covered a cover and it wasn't as good as having a 77 00:06:37,200 --> 00:06:43,680 computer but it definitely prepared me because this magazine like all 80s computer magazines had 78 00:06:43,680 --> 00:06:50,160 at all it had coverage of the 8-bit micro's the newly emerging 16-bit systems it had basic 79 00:06:50,160 --> 00:06:56,720 programs you could type in and it even had those basic programs with slight modifications for 80 00:06:56,720 --> 00:07:02,400 other systems so the base program was apple soft basic but then here's the section to change 81 00:07:02,400 --> 00:07:06,480 for the PC and it would be like 10 lines you would change and here's the section for Commodore and so on 82 00:07:07,280 --> 00:07:12,960 and reading that kind of taught me a little bit of computer programming without actually having 83 00:07:13,280 --> 00:07:22,800 the computer in 1984 my middle school was teaching languages to 7th graders and I was taught basic 84 00:07:22,800 --> 00:07:28,720 and I was also taught logo for those who don't know logo is a graphical programming language where 85 00:07:28,720 --> 00:07:35,840 you enter simple commands like put the pen down on the paper move forward 10 pixels turn right 90 86 00:07:35,840 --> 00:07:40,880 degrees move forward another 10 pixels and so on you could draw simple pictures with it it was 87 00:07:40,880 --> 00:07:47,920 designed as a teaching language but that is where the light bulb went on with programming for me 88 00:07:47,920 --> 00:07:54,800 not necessarily basic I don't know why but in logo you could define procedures these procedures could 89 00:07:54,800 --> 00:08:00,720 take arguments and you could name the procedures whatever you wanted so this light bulb of oh 90 00:08:00,720 --> 00:08:06,800 if I'm doing a lot of repetitive actions and the only thing that changes about them is this one 91 00:08:06,800 --> 00:08:12,720 thing which is of course a variable then I can kind of put it all in you know a macro it 92 00:08:12,720 --> 00:08:16,320 wasn't a macro but you know what I mean it's you could bundle it all up in a little package and give 93 00:08:16,320 --> 00:08:21,520 it its own name and all you had to do was change the argument and then all the code would run 94 00:08:21,520 --> 00:08:28,320 with that different argument light bulb completely went on I really loved programming at that point 95 00:08:28,320 --> 00:08:33,920 I was selling in the two programming classes that I was in and myself and a few other students were 96 00:08:34,240 --> 00:08:40,080 similarly gifted and the school was forward thinking enough that they created a special seventh grade 97 00:08:40,080 --> 00:08:45,920 class just for gifted computer students this was amazing think of it like a like a Montessori 98 00:08:45,920 --> 00:08:51,120 class almost it was not directed now unfortunately that means of course we ended up playing and 99 00:08:51,120 --> 00:08:58,480 copying a lot of games in there but they arranged to have presentations from local computer people come in 100 00:08:58,480 --> 00:09:04,720 I grew up in the Chicago land area and Gottlieb was there Gottlieb was an arcade game manufacturer 101 00:09:04,720 --> 00:09:10,480 they created Cuebert they created the laser disk game mock three and someone from Gottlieb 102 00:09:10,480 --> 00:09:17,040 dragged those arcade games in for one of our classes and gave us an overview and a demonstration of 103 00:09:17,040 --> 00:09:24,720 the arcade games and how they were created satisfying and yet expanding my intellectual curiosity 104 00:09:25,440 --> 00:09:32,080 finally in Christmas of 1984 we finally did receive a system I father worked for AT&T at the time 105 00:09:32,880 --> 00:09:39,680 and he got a corporate discount on their clone their PC clone at the time the AT&T 6300 106 00:09:40,560 --> 00:09:46,240 and finally we had a computer and the first thing I did I went bonkers entering in all of the magazine 107 00:09:46,240 --> 00:09:52,240 type events from the family computing magazine subscription we had previously and typing them in 108 00:09:53,040 --> 00:09:58,160 just indirectly teaches you programming teaches you better programming teaches you structured programming 109 00:09:59,280 --> 00:10:05,040 moving on a little bit more into high school that's pretty much where intellectual curiosity went 110 00:10:05,040 --> 00:10:12,160 rampant I was also interested in music and I was trying to get better music out of the computer we owned 111 00:10:12,720 --> 00:10:20,000 but an IBM PC doesn't have a sound ship so you figured out how to work within your limitations 112 00:10:20,080 --> 00:10:25,600 I started out writing basic programs that would play music I then figured out chords by playing 113 00:10:25,600 --> 00:10:31,680 arpeggios fast it's a single output PC speaker can only play one note at a time but 114 00:10:32,640 --> 00:10:38,960 you know if you can quickly rapidly you know rotate through different notes it sounds a little bit like a 115 00:10:38,960 --> 00:10:45,680 chord later I saved up and purchased music construction set for the PC which sounded very much like 116 00:10:45,840 --> 00:10:52,160 you were trying to murder a buzzer but it did try to approximate for voices and that was fantastic 117 00:10:52,160 --> 00:10:58,880 and later I got bank street music writer which came with a piece of hardware that output six real 118 00:10:58,880 --> 00:11:08,320 voices and that further fueled my my passion for trying to compose and play back music on the PC 119 00:11:09,120 --> 00:11:12,880 obviously being a teenager during this time I was copying more and more games 120 00:11:13,840 --> 00:11:20,240 but I was a little different than my friends I wasn't copying games based on how fun they were 121 00:11:21,040 --> 00:11:27,840 I was copying games based on how well they were programmed I tended to grab the simulators the 122 00:11:27,840 --> 00:11:34,000 flight simulators or maybe a racing game or something that had particularly fast graphics that kind of thing 123 00:11:34,000 --> 00:11:38,560 certainly arcade games arcade ports not all of them were terrible for the PC 124 00:11:39,280 --> 00:11:45,120 unfortunately for me in high school I was not particularly good at math maybe I was but I wasn't a 125 00:11:45,120 --> 00:11:51,120 particularly good student and as such I did not qualify for the AP programming classes where they were teaching 126 00:11:51,120 --> 00:11:56,080 all sorts of fun stuff like advanced algorithms and they were using this new language I'd never heard of 127 00:11:56,080 --> 00:12:03,600 Pascal I ended up ditching one of my classes to audit the programming class it was probably social 128 00:12:03,680 --> 00:12:08,320 studies or history something that of course fascinates me now but didn't in high school no idea why 129 00:12:09,600 --> 00:12:15,360 funny how life works out but I really wanted to learn turbo Pascal because it ran so much faster than 130 00:12:15,360 --> 00:12:21,520 basic once it was compiled and a lot of my friends were in there including Brian Hertz who I later 131 00:12:21,520 --> 00:12:27,760 co-founded mobile games with when I wasn't trying to figure out how to hack my classes at school I was 132 00:12:27,760 --> 00:12:33,200 back in home trying to figure out how to hack the hardware our computer did not have a hard drive so 133 00:12:33,200 --> 00:12:38,960 trying to deal with a single floppy and then later two floppy system required a little bit of 134 00:12:38,960 --> 00:12:44,880 hacking especially if you wanted to play games that required two flopbies or a hard drive or so on one trick 135 00:12:44,880 --> 00:12:50,720 I learned was whenever a program exits it has to reload command dot com this is a PC running 136 00:12:50,720 --> 00:12:56,080 doc but there were situations where I couldn't have the doc disk in the drive so I learned how to 137 00:12:56,080 --> 00:13:02,400 create a ram drive copy command dot com to it and then set the comm spec environment variable 138 00:13:02,400 --> 00:13:08,240 to point to the ram drive and that saved quite a bit of disk swapping also little things like 139 00:13:08,240 --> 00:13:14,960 figuring out that burning up another 36 kilobytes of ram was worth loading a small disk cache 140 00:13:14,960 --> 00:13:20,320 just to get the forest read ahead caching so some disk cache is you know you tell them to read one 141 00:13:20,320 --> 00:13:25,920 sector and then they'll go ahead and read all the sectors on that track anyway just in case you need the 142 00:13:25,920 --> 00:13:32,320 next one the next sector and a very small cache could go ahead and do that and that made slow games 143 00:13:32,320 --> 00:13:40,480 load from floppy disk gosh three times faster probably my journey in tech continued throughout high 144 00:13:40,480 --> 00:13:45,840 school pyriting games joining pirate groups working for software stores and becoming a 145 00:13:45,840 --> 00:13:50,880 a career because I could grab the games from the software stores copy them throw them up onto a 146 00:13:50,880 --> 00:13:57,040 BBS and return the game the next day let's jump forward to New Year's Eve 1990 I've already told 147 00:13:57,040 --> 00:14:02,400 you that I was kind of trying to force non musical computers to do better music and I delighted 148 00:14:02,400 --> 00:14:08,240 and well programmed games versus like adventures and stuff I loved pyriting games so it's no 149 00:14:08,240 --> 00:14:16,720 wonder that when I discovered the demo scene I really took to it I had been aware of the demo scene 150 00:14:16,720 --> 00:14:22,880 indirectly by watching crack trows and other animated messages that show up before you play a game 151 00:14:22,880 --> 00:14:29,120 showing you know who cracked it shoutouts to their friends bragging that kind of stuff but I grabbed my 152 00:14:29,120 --> 00:14:36,880 first real pure demo the space pigs mega demo off of a BBS on New Year's Eve 1990 and I watched it 153 00:14:37,360 --> 00:14:44,480 and just everything clicked it was like there's a group of people out there who hack the computer 154 00:14:44,480 --> 00:14:52,160 for fun make it do stuff that the designers never intended and that was it I just that's all I wanted 155 00:14:52,160 --> 00:14:59,120 to do and ever since that time period I have been involved in the demo scene often on in one way or 156 00:14:59,280 --> 00:15:05,680 another let's continue on throughout the 90s my hacking journey continues my first Unix was 157 00:15:05,680 --> 00:15:14,000 Harris UX on a Harris mini computer at DePaul University then later I was working for a Unix 158 00:15:14,000 --> 00:15:20,960 company I worked for Mark Williams company this is before Linux existed Mark Williams company created a 159 00:15:20,960 --> 00:15:29,360 home brew clone of system five our four called coherent and it was actually it wasn't even 160 00:15:29,360 --> 00:15:35,600 system five or four it was before that it was really like a clone of system seven so it was kind of limited 161 00:15:35,600 --> 00:15:41,440 but it was a Unix that you could run on a 26 or higher and it cost 99 dollars and came with a huge 162 00:15:41,440 --> 00:15:48,160 gigantic manual and working for them first this technical sales and then later in the technical 163 00:15:48,160 --> 00:15:55,680 support department of course I learned all sorts of fun hacking my very first email address that 164 00:15:55,680 --> 00:16:02,640 that delivered email directly to my house was hacked up via UUCP in fact you can search and try to 165 00:16:02,640 --> 00:16:12,160 find my original email address which is get ready for this MWC bang Utricks bang MWCBBS bang 166 00:16:12,160 --> 00:16:21,680 TRX home bang trickster at UUNet.UU.Net that was a really mil and it got all the way to my house 167 00:16:22,800 --> 00:16:28,880 later I left Mark Williams company and no longer ran coherent on my home system although there was 168 00:16:28,880 --> 00:16:34,720 another good reason for that but that's a story for another day so I ended up running slackware 169 00:16:34,720 --> 00:16:42,960 on my 386 40 megahertz system in 1994 connecting to the internet via slip serial line IP this is 170 00:16:42,960 --> 00:16:49,760 before PPP existed discovering this crazy new thing called the worldwide web hacking knowledge 171 00:16:49,760 --> 00:16:55,120 continued by finding out that you could by discovering that you could view the source of any 172 00:16:55,120 --> 00:17:03,280 web page you were looking at so that's how I taught myself HTML also around this time I was doing 173 00:17:03,280 --> 00:17:11,440 some demo scene coding I preferred Pascal having learned it from that AP course I was crashing 174 00:17:12,160 --> 00:17:16,720 but the thing that made it usable for demo coding and for anything performance related is that 175 00:17:16,720 --> 00:17:22,320 at some point turbo Pascal I think it was six and later added the ability to have inline a 176 00:17:22,320 --> 00:17:29,600 simpler and that was fantastic you could just simply inline a simpler to replace a series of statements 177 00:17:29,680 --> 00:17:35,680 that were very slower or that the compiler could not optimize then something curious happened 178 00:17:36,480 --> 00:17:44,720 in the late 90s I had children I was married in 94 and we had children in 97 and 99 and 179 00:17:44,720 --> 00:17:52,000 as a default activity hacking mostly stopped and I'm not mad this is nobody's fault it's just life 180 00:17:52,880 --> 00:17:59,200 and I thought at the time that well this is the next phase of my life I have children now 181 00:17:59,680 --> 00:18:04,160 I have a family I need to pay attention to them and I need to provide for them 182 00:18:04,720 --> 00:18:10,880 what ended up happening is that all that prior hacking experience I just described all those skills 183 00:18:10,880 --> 00:18:17,440 ended up translating into good job skills and job performance I became skilled at troubleshooting 184 00:18:17,520 --> 00:18:23,520 poorly documented systems and removing bottlenecks I worked for a cybersecurity forum for 185 00:18:23,520 --> 00:18:30,160 five years troubleshooting crazy stuff like quadrupling knatted firewalls and I was called the 186 00:18:30,160 --> 00:18:37,840 smartest kid in the room for most of the 2000s these days I am not called the smartest kid in the room 187 00:18:38,960 --> 00:18:44,320 and most of the time I'm not and that's actually good because that means everyone is smarter than me 188 00:18:44,400 --> 00:18:50,560 which means I must be in a really great work environment hacking does continue but only 189 00:18:50,560 --> 00:18:56,880 sparsely and really on my terms for example I was always annoyed that the original PC could have 190 00:18:56,880 --> 00:19:04,240 been programmed better so eventually my demo scene activity focused on it I've had a crew 191 00:19:04,240 --> 00:19:11,680 so to speak since let's say 2013 and my crew and I won the old school compost at revision 2015 192 00:19:11,680 --> 00:19:20,400 and evoke 2022 and we received scene dot org awards and meteoric awards for those productions 193 00:19:20,400 --> 00:19:24,560 those awards are kind of like the Oscars for the demo scene just for lack of better term 194 00:19:25,360 --> 00:19:31,760 so I still hack it's just changed in scope you know here's another scope change as previously mentioned 195 00:19:31,760 --> 00:19:37,040 I help run a vintage computer festival every year a vintage computer festival Midwest and we 196 00:19:37,120 --> 00:19:43,760 have to put on a show that serves over 2,000 people with only six volunteers and hardly any 197 00:19:43,760 --> 00:19:52,240 money or equipment we also don't charge for the show so we kind of have to make do with donations 198 00:19:52,240 --> 00:19:59,600 and donated equipment and spur the moment grabbing somebody for manpower and things like that 199 00:20:00,560 --> 00:20:06,720 trying to put on a vintage computer festival that serves over 2,000 people with only six 200 00:20:06,720 --> 00:20:14,240 guys has to be hacking in some form it's it's just got to be you know hacking has served me 201 00:20:14,240 --> 00:20:20,000 really well for half a century I guess I'm happy to be that old but I guess I'm also happy that 202 00:20:20,000 --> 00:20:25,280 hacking has enriched my life for that long you know hacking isn't limited to just personal enjoyment 203 00:20:25,360 --> 00:20:30,640 of tech it's helped me in my career and it's also helped me socially when you meet another hacker 204 00:20:30,640 --> 00:20:37,040 you've both immediately got this shared vocabulary and interests and you can use that to speak 205 00:20:37,040 --> 00:20:42,720 in a sort of shorthand to communicate quicker and more effectively when I go to a demo party you know 206 00:20:42,720 --> 00:20:49,920 I like to say that I can crack a shade bob joke and someone somewhere will get it and that's a 207 00:20:50,000 --> 00:20:58,160 really great feeling that has been my journey thus far I hope it continues and I hope that if you 208 00:20:58,160 --> 00:21:04,880 are a budding young hacker and you are trying to hack your life your situation your tools your 209 00:21:04,880 --> 00:21:12,480 utilities your relationships for better I hope you have the intellectual curiosity to discover 210 00:21:12,480 --> 00:21:23,040 what works for you and carry it through thanks for listening you have been listening to 211 00:21:23,040 --> 00:21:28,880 hacker public radio as hacker public radio does work today's show was contributed by a 212 00:21:28,880 --> 00:21:34,720 HBR this night like yourself if you ever thought of recording podcast you click on our 213 00:21:34,720 --> 00:21:42,080 contribute link to 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